Food Stamps Use PLUMMETS After States Implement Work Requirements [VIDEO]

As states have restructured their food stamp requirements, there has been a dramatic drop in the number of people applying for them… the numbers have plummeted by 85% in Alabama alone. Just wow. In most of these states, able-bodied adults have to actively prove they are looking for work now. At the peak of the food stamp insanity, 48 million Americans were getting them in 2013. In Alabama for instance, if you are an able-boded adult with no children, you have to either actively look for a job or participate in work training to get food stamps. Otherwise you only get a few weeks worth every year.

In Georgia, they are taking similar steps to trim the food stamp rolls. By the end of the first three months, the number of adults receiving benefits in three participating counties dropped by 58 percent. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently reported that in 21 additional counties that restored the work requirement, there was a 62 percent drop in SNAP participants. That’s just stunning. It makes you wonder how many people out there were getting food stamps simply because they were free, not because they needed them to survive.

After the food stamp rolls swelled for years under the Obama administration, fresh figures show a dramatic reduction in states that recently have moved to restore work requirements.

States were allowed to waive those rules for able-bodied adults thanks to the 2009 economic stimulus. As the rules loosened and the economy sputtered out of the recession, food stamp enrollment soared to record levels – peaking at nearly 48 million nationwide in 2013.

But while that number has dipped gradually in recent years, some states have moved aggressively to push recipients who can work back into the job market and, in due time, off the program.

Alabama began 2017 by requiring able-bodied adults without children in 13 counties to either find a job or participate in work training as a condition for continuing to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

“Work requirements have been enormously successful at reducing the number of people on food stamps. And while they made sense in the early part of the recession when unemployment was higher, that is no longer the case,” said Robert Doar, who is a fellow in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute. What all this boils down to is the work requirement that applies to adults aged 18 to 49 is producing results and forcing these people back into the workforce. You are only supposed to get food stamps if you cannot find work or are unable to work. Most of these people are quite capable of working.

Originally, the lax food stamp rules were meant to help Americans in a depressed economy. And at one level it did. But mostly what it did was to actually further hurt the economy and it certainly didn’t do any favors for those who should be working. Production is the basis of morale. “Welfare was never intended to be a one-way handout, but a program based on the idea of reciprocity,” said Robert Rector, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Those who receive benefits from the government should be required to work or participate in work-training as a condition.” And that is exactly right and the way it should be. It’s the way it used to be pre-Obama.

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton is an editor and writer for Right Wing News. She owns and blogs at NoisyRoom.net. She is a Constitutional Conservative and NoisyRoom focuses on political and national issues of interest to the American public. Terresa is the editor at Trevor Loudon's site, New Zeal - trevorloudon.com. She also does research at KeyWiki.org. You can email Terresa here. NoisyRoom can be found on Facebook and on Twitter.